Parental control applications may provide a parent with the ability to monitor and block communications between their child and online contacts with whom their child communicates. However, a child's online community may be enormous, including hundreds of friends and acquaintances from both the real world (e.g., school) and online (e.g., gaming) activities. While conventional solutions may help parents find individual instances of inappropriate content in a child's communications, it may be very difficult for a parent to use such solutions to make policy decisions for a large list of online friends.
Conventional parental control solutions are inadequate for dealing with the ever-growing online landscape in which children are involved. Such solutions may implement simple text searches to find suspect keywords and may generate a high number of false positives. Traditional solutions may also find individual instances of suspect keywords, but may only focus on obscenities and other easily detectable violations of parental-control policies. Furthermore, traditional solutions may not help parents make informed and efficient decisions regarding whether they should allow their children to communicate with particular online contacts or whether they should more closely monitor conversations between their children and particular online contacts.